Tankard
surname · Latin script
Meaning: either an occupational name for a maker of drinking vessels, or from a nickname for a heavy drinker; also from the Norman personal name Tancard, ‘thought-brave’
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 3 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
/ˈtæŋkəd/(recorded in a dictionary) English · from Wiktionary
Tankard is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- AUAustralia
- GBUnited Kingdom
- USUnited States
Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)either an occupational name for a maker of drinking vessels, or from a nickname for a heavy drinker; also from the Norman personal name Tancard, ‘thought-brave’.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Recorded in:
No national register we accept counts this name’s bearers, so the page lists where it is found and publishes no figure.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses
(measured from records)Tankard is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, Old Germanic Tancard, 'thought-hard'; possibly also metonymic for a maker of tankards; first attested Tankardus Flandrensis 1175 P (Nf)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, A large drinking vessel, sometimes of pewter, sometimes with a glass base, with one handle and often a hinged cover.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Irish, Numerous and prominent in Leinster in mediaeval times Tankard is now very rare. Tancred is used as a synonym, though often of different derivation : Tankard is maker of tankards, Tancred from Old-German tancrad (thought counsel). See Hankard
as a nameThe Surnames of Ireland
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- Harry Tankardb. 1884(1884-1944) Managing Director of Tankard and Smith 1884 Born in Finsbury the son of Charles James Tankard, a Tailor's Bust Maker, and h...
- Melinda Tankard Reistb. 1963AUAustralian writer, speaker, blogger and media commentator
- Allen Tankardb. 1969GBEnglish footballer (born 1969)
- Nigel Peter Stewart Tankardb. 1970GB(born 1970)
- Danae TankardBritish historian
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
How to address them
(machine-generated)Evidence
(measured from records)9 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 3 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GB United Kingdom | Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register) | 2002 | 697 | #8,785 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 461 | #46,219 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 458 | #49,576 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 422 | #47,308 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 10 | #120,154 |
| GB United Kingdom | A Dictionary of Surnames (Hanks & Hodges, 1988) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 2
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Tankard mean, and where does it come from?
- either an occupational name for a maker of drinking vessels, or from a nickname for a heavy drinker; also from the Norman personal name Tancard, ‘thought-brave’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Tankard?
- In English /ˈtæŋkəd/ (Wiktionary).
- In which country does Tankard have the most bearers?
- Tankard is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Tankard?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/tankardThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Tankard”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.